


Greyscale

by tempered_rose



Category: Football RPF, Real Person Fiction, Sports RPF
Genre: 5 Things, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, M/M, Soulmates, implied Jamie Carragher/Michael Owen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-06
Updated: 2016-03-06
Packaged: 2018-05-25 03:32:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,343
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6178609
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tempered_rose/pseuds/tempered_rose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The world exists without color, at least until you find your soulmate. No matter how long it takes, there's always a true love to be found, isn't there? There's always 'the one' to bring the colors…it's just a shame Gary stopped believing a long time ago.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Greyscale

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ascience](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ascience/gifts).



**Five.**

As a child, Gary always secretly liked to listen in as his gran would tell Phil and Tracey the story about the Colors. He would pretend he wasn’t listening, of course, because he was a big boy and big boys (especially big brothers) didn’t believe in all that fairy tale garbage.

However, since his world was very clearly black and white it was a strange thing to hear about these beautiful shades of purples and golds and many other things. All Gary, and everyone else, knew was a grayscale world and that was fine enough for him. Gray, white and black, were tangible, real; it was what he knew. Sure, he was only eight but he’d seen enough of the world to know that colors weren’t easily found and what was the point of them anyway? He had all he needed. Footballs were black and white. Lines on a football pitch were easily defined; cricket jumpers were also comfortably plain. Who needed colors?

Still, he listened as the story carried on about how their gran had discovered the colors when their granddad had seen her for the first time. She said the first thing she noticed were how darker greys had faded to become red, then the blue, and yellows came, followed by an array of orange and purple and green and lastly all the others seemed to fill themselves in. She painted a beautiful picture, but Gary couldn’t wrap his mind around such a thing.

Who needed a rainbow when you had a clear-cut picture of all things black and white?

**Four.**

James Carragher’s homework assignment one night in his third year was ‘what would you like to see the most in the world?’. Most other boys said something like Liverpool (or a few with Everton, _idiots_ ) winning the league or the European Cup. Others said various travel destinations. A few others said a few lost pets.

James Carragher wrote ‘the colors’.

James Carragher always believed in them, but he never saw them, at least not yet, but he held out hope that one day he would and so he waited, and waited, right as he grew up, he kept them in the back of his mind.

Once there was a flicker of something he thought was maybe red, but it melded back into grey as the United boys’ team came out to play against the Liverpool side. Liverpool won, of course, and Jamie forgot about the colors for a while as he went off to celebrate with his friends.

**Three.**

As Gary grew older and the colors never came, he put it aside as the fairy tale it always had been. Soulmates? Who believed in that nonsense? He played his football and got better at it, along with his friends and they rose through the system of Manchester United. Everything was perfect and more than he ever imagined when he was a boy. He was playing for the club he always loved and even sometimes his country. He was making more money than he ever imagined. Everything was perfect.

All that changed when Phil met Julie and he tried to explain the colors to Gary. The elder Neville thought he would never forget the look on Phil’s face of disbelief and the thinly (too thinly) veiled pity he saw there.

“I-I’m sorry, Gaz. I assumed you’d seen them already…” Phil trails off and rubs the back of his neck and Gary can’t take the look on his brother’s face so he gets up and says, honestly, while not quite meeting his eyes.

“It’s fine. I’m happy for you both.”

He leaves and goes home and wanders around his grey house in the grey city he loves and wonders why Phil can see them and he can’t.

But then, Phil always believed, didn’t he?

**Two.**

The colors almost come, once. Michael’s been your best friend since you both started playing in Liverpool’s academy. You laugh at his jokes and you think he’s a good mate. You never really thought it’d be a bloke that the cosmos decided would be your soulmate, but you’re not really bothered by it. After all, you want to know what this Liverpool red really looks like and when it comes down to it, you’re more curious about that then being in love with Mikey Owen.

Maybe that’s why he left. Cause he knew you didn’t fancy him the same. Or maybe it had nothing to do with you and he was being selfish. Maybe he wasn’t. All you knew is that he left and you were alone again in a colorless world still waiting for a soulmate without a name to show up and show you the world you’ve read about and heard about your entire life.

Either way, Liverpool wins the champions league the final year and you’ve had one dream come true, just not the one that was written on that homework assignment from all those years ago.

**One.**

The thing about soulmates is that isn’t so easy as ‘love at first sight’. You can meet someone over and over again and think you fancy them, but they aren’t the right one. Or maybe they were the right one at the wrong time. Maybe you hate them originally but years and games later, there is something about them that is just different, something that is just _right_.

That’s how it ended up coming to be.

Gary wasn’t sure how it would all play out when they announced Carragher was going to be joining him for Sky. He’d played against him for years, hated him for most of that time, and didn’t think about him one way or the other for most of the rest of that time. He had no opinion of the man apart from the simple fact Carragher was Liverpool and Scouse, the two worst crimes a footballer could be.

However, something shifted when Jamie walked out onto the set for the first time and Gary couldn’t quite believe it.

The world was changing before his eyes. Grey was fading into a deep, royal color with several shades lighter moving in a gradient away from the deepest part. Another rich color was shimmering just under the word ‘Sky’. The first color was everywhere now, popping up all around their set.

Jamie’s suit was black, his shirt white, but his tie had a stripe to it and the color there did not fit in the world of black, white, and grey.

The colors had come at last, and shock must have been on Gary’s face because Jamie had a similar reaction. They stared at one another from across the studio, Ed and the others oblivious to what was going on.

Finally, Jamie seemed to come to terms with it faster than Gary did because he moved over.

“All right, Nevs?”

Gary couldn’t speak, so he just shook his head and Jamie smiled a little.

“I think a pint or two is in order after this. What do you think?”

Suspicious and reluctant to accept what had just happened, Gary simply nodded once. For only a handful of times in his life, he’d never been able to speak properly, and Gary marked this down as one of them.

His soulmate, the one who brought the colors, was Jamie Carragher? A _Scouser_? Oh, Phil and Becks would never let him hear the end of it.

Jamie moved over to the other side of Ed and sat down, engaging the other man in a conversation and Gary had to give him credit. If Jamie was bothered by this, he didn’t look the least bit affected. It wasn’t fair.

Gary blinked as he became adjusted to a world with color—there really was a lot of blue? in this studio, wasn’t there?—and went about his job again. A pint wouldn’t do later; he was going to need something much, much stronger.

At least he and Phil had something new to talk about now, he guessed as the cameras began to roll and Ed started the introduction.

**Author's Note:**

> I really hope you like it! One day I'll play around with this a bit more and possibly expand it!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [灰调地带 （Greyscale）](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8162437) by [natalia_lip](https://archiveofourown.org/users/natalia_lip/pseuds/natalia_lip)




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